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Parable of the Talents by [Octavia E. Butler]

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Octavia E. Butler

Parable of the Talents Kindle Edition

by Octavia E. Butler (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Book 2 of 2: Parable

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Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel: The powerful and compelling sequel to the dystopian classic Parable of the Sower

Lauren Olamina was only eighteen when her family was killed, and anarchy encroached on her Southern California home. She fled the war zone for the hope of quiet and safety in the north. There she founded Acorn, a peaceful community based on a religion of her creation, called Earthseed, whose central tenet is that God is change. Five years later, Lauren has married a doctor and given birth to a daughter. Acorn is beginning to thrive. But outside the tranquil group’s walls, America is changing for the worse.

Presidential candidate Andrew Steele Jarret wins national fame by preaching a return to the values of the American golden age. To his marauding followers, who are identified by their crosses and black robes, this is a call to arms to end religious tolerance and racial equality—a brutal doctrine they enforce by machine gun. And as this band of violent extremists sets its deadly sights on Earthseed, Acorn is plunged into a harrowing fight for its very survival.

Taking its place alongside Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Butler’s eerily prophetic novel offers a terrifying vision of our potential future, but also one of hope.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Octavia E. Butler including rare images from the author’s estate.

Book 2 of 2

Parable
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434 pages
Language

English
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Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Publication date

July 24 2012
File size

5558 KB
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Books In This Series (2 Books)

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Parable

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1
Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler

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2
Parable of the Talents
Octavia E. Butler

(6,774)

Kindle Edition

CDN$19.98

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How much of this nonsense does he believe, I wonder, and how much does he say just because he knows the value of dividing in order to conquer and to rule?
Highlighted by 1,704 Kindle readers
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears.
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Beware: At war Or at peace, More people die Of unenlightened self-interest Than of any other disease.
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From the Publisher

From the Illustrated Biography


Octavia E. Butler at age thirteen Butler began writing the year before when a science fiction film—the cult favorite Devil Girl from Mars—inspired her to create something of her own.	Parable of the Sower book tour Butler on a book tour for Parable of the Sower in New York City in 1993.	Octavia E. Butler's legacy When Butler passed away in 2006, the New York Times eulogized her as a world-renowned author whose science fiction explored 'far-reaching issues of race, sex, power and, ultimately, what it means to be human.'

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Review

"ENTHRALLING...COMPELLING AND TRULY ORIGINAL".

-- DENVER POST

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

In this brilliant sequel to Parable of the Sower (LJ 10/15/93), Nebula and Hugo Award winner Butler continues the compelling story of Lauren Olamina, chronicling her struggle for survival in a socially and economically depressed California in the 2030s. Lauren has founded a quiet community called Acorn, where she teaches people about Earthseed, her belief that God is simply another name for Change. Her community of believers is threatened, however, by the election of an ultraconservative president opposed to any religion not his own. Among his followers are fanatical terrorists who will stop at nothing to destroy what Lauren has built, including forcibly separating parents from their children. Butler tells this story through Lauren's journal entries, her poetry, and commentary from her daughter. Powerful, moving, and beautifully written, this book belongs in every library.?Laurel Bliss, New Haven, CT
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Amazon

Octavia Butler tackles the creation of a new religion, the making of a god, and the ultimate fate of humanity in her Earthseed series, which began with Parable of the Sower, and now continues with Parable of the Talents. The saga began with the near-future dystopian tale of Sower, in which young Lauren Olamina began to realize her destiny as a leader of people dispossessed and destroyed by the crumbling of society. The basic principles of Lauren's faith, Earthseed, were contained in a collection of deceptively simple proverbs that Lauren used to recruit followers. She teaches that "God is change" and that humanity's ultimate destiny is among the stars.

In Parable of the Talents, the seeds of change that Lauren planted begin to bear fruit, but in unpredictable and brutal ways. Her small community is destroyed, her child is kidnapped, and she is imprisoned by sadistic zealots. She must find a way to escape and begin again, without family or friends. Her single-mindedness in teaching Earthseed may be her only chance to survive, but paradoxically, may cause the ultimate estrangement of her beloved daughter. Parable of the Talents is told from both mother's and daughter's perspectives, but it is the narrative of Lauren's grown daughter, who has seen her mother made into a deity of sorts, that is the most compelling. Butler's writing is simple and elegant, and her storytelling skills are superb, as usual. Fans will be eagerly awaiting the next installment in what promises to be a moving and adventurous saga. --Therese Littleton

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

About the Author

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER, often referred to as the "grand dame of science fiction," was the author of several award-winning novels including Parable of the Talents, winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and numerous literary awards, she has been acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future. She passed away on February 24, 2006.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

Butler concludes the spiritual and physical journey, begun in Parable of the Sower (1993), of Lauren Oya Olamina, an 18-year-old African American who has survived most of her family's demise and a lengthy journey on the dangerous roads of early-twenty-first-century California. She has created her own religion, Earthseed, which empowers people to master change and has as its ultimate goal the colonization of other worlds. Olamina has gathered around her a community of outcasts and wanderers that is beginning to thrive when a fundamentalist Christian wins the presidency. His zealots overrun Olamina's village, enslave the adults with pain-inflicting collars, and adopt the children into Christian American families. Olamina must somehow free herself and her followers and begin another painful journey to find her infant daughter. She is unexpectedly reunited with her brother Marcus, but instead of helping each other, they are on opposite sides of a deep religious chasm. The novel revolves around the question of which is more important to Olamina: her fledgling religion or her own flesh and blood. Roberta Johnson --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Lauren Olamina, a black teenager, grew up in a 21st-century America that was tearing itself apart. Global warming, massive unemployment, gang warfare and corporate greed combined to break down society in general and her impoverished southern California neighborhood in particular. A victim of hyperempathy syndrome, a disorder that compels its victims to believe they feel others' pain, Lauren found herself homeless and alone in a violent world. Escaping from the urban jungle of Los Angeles, Lauren founded Acorn, a hard-working, prosperous rural community based on the teachings of Earthseed, a religion she herself created and centered on the ideas that God is Change and that humanity's destiny is to go to the stars. Butler's extraordinary Parable of the Sower (1996) detailed the aforementioned events. In this equally powerful sequel, Acorn is destroyed by the rising forces of Christian fundamentalism, led by the newly elected U.S. president, the Reverend Andrew Steele Jarret. A handsome man and persuasive orator, seemingly modeled in part on Pat Robertson, Jarret converts millions to his sect, Christian America, while his thugs imprison, rape and murder those they label "heathens," all the while kidnapping their children in order to raise them in Christian households. The narrative is both impassioned and bitter as Butler weaves a tale of a frighteningly believable near-future dystopia. Lauren, at once loving wife and mother, prophet and fanatic, victim and leader, gains stature as one of the most intense and well-developed protagonists in recent SF. Though not for the faint-hearted, this work stands out as a testament to the author's enormous talent, and to the human spirit.. Author tour. (Nov.) FYI: In 1995, Butler received a MacArthur Foundation ("genius") Award.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Back Cover

Lauren Olamina's love is divided among her young daughter, her community, and the revelation that led Lauren to found a new faith that teaches "God Is Change". But in the wake of environmental and economic chaos, the U.S. government turns a blind eye to violent bigots who consider the mere existence of a black female leader a threat. And soon Lauren must either sacrifice her child and her followers -- or forsake the religion that can transform human destiny. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008HALPHC
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (July 24 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5558 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 434 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #14,062 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Black & African American Science Fiction
- #44 in Black & African American Women's Fiction
- #156 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
6,774 ratings

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Octavia E. Butler

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OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (1947–2006) was the renowned author of numerous ground-breaking novels, including Kindred, Wild Seed, and Parable of the Sower. Recipient of the Locus, Hugo and Nebula awards, and a PEN Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work, in 1995 she became the first science- fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship ‘Genius Grant’. A pioneer of her genre, Octavia’s dystopian novels explore myriad themes of Black injustice, women’s rights, global warming and political disparity, and her work is taught in over two hundred colleges and universities nationwide.

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5

6,774 global ratings

5 star		69%
4 star		22%
3 star		7%
2 star		1%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Laura Flinn

Great book could not put it down!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 13, 2022

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Amazing storytelling such a good book highly recommend

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 8, 2022

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Reading this series this close to the time and climate it is set in - a little uncomfortable. Excellent in my opinion. The characters are complex, the plot interesting. All in all an enjoyable read.

2 people found this helpful

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Tyra

I LOVE THIS BOOK

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 7, 2022

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This author is great love all her novels!

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Physick

People’s reaction to crisis

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 9, 2020

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I recently discovered this author and she certainly has written some good books. She pegged human reactions and it is a bit disconcerting to think what we would do in extreme crisis.

One person found this helpful

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T.C.

Haunting, but wonderful

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on June 21, 2020

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Along with the Parable of the Sower, I couldn’t put this book down. It is especially relevant to today’s world (2020). The story is heart wrenching and difficult to read emotionally-speaking, but thoughtful and thought provoking and, in a way, hopeful. This is an excellent novel that I highly recommend.

3 people found this helpful

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Dawn

A Rare 5 Stars

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 3, 2020

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Few books impress me but these writings are timely, deep, intelligent, culturally important and engrossing. Octavia brilliantly comments on gross capitalism and its inevitable moral and societal degradation beautifully. A gifted story teller who crawls into the skin of her characters to bring them to life.

2 people found this helpful

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Josie Boyce

Wow, just wow

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 15, 2017

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I loved the Parable of The Sower so much that it was a bit hard to get started in this sequel, The Parable of the Talents. In which Butler ever so masterfully deconstructs the heroine of that first book, both through the character's arc, and through other voices that critique and deconstruct a character who you thought had already been through it all. Also the book is even more relevant than even parable of the sower was to the current state of America and the world. Chillingly so. Wow. What any amazing and prescient duology. Wow.

3 people found this helpful

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Trin

Excellent.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 13, 2017

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Got this because my prof mentioned the author in class and I was curious. I was pleasantly surprised by the vividness of her storey telling. The characters came to life as I was reading and the book just drew me in. I found it to be a heavy read at some point, but it makes your mind turn.
An excellent dystopian novel.

*Keep in mind I'm just your average book worm, who likes to read. Not a Phd in Lit whose here to give a full-length thesis style critique.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Sarah Pemberton

Unpleasant, boring and a failure as a novel

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 17, 2021

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I had high hopes based on the author's other work, but was very disappointed. This book is largely told through the diary of an unpleasant female cult leader - she is egotistical, considers herself to be always right, blames others for everything that goes wrong, and barely mourns her husband when he dies suddenly. Regrettably, the author portrays this character as a 'Mary Sue' i.e. an unrealistic heroine with infinite emotional and physical resilience who is effortlessly accepted as a leader by others despite her failings and who we (the readers) are expected to admire. There is some attempt to explore the main character's relationships with her daughter and brother, but this needs to be fleshed out so that her other family members become more three dimensional. There is no real character development over the course of the book because the central character never admits that she is wrong.

Nearly all of the story occurs within a prison camp and given the narrative style this is told largely through diary entries listing abuses by the guards, including torture, many rapes, and the (inadvertent?) death of several characters. These events are unpleasant to hear about and not very original. Moreover, a diary was poor choice of narrative device for these scenes because events that should be exciting and emotionally charged do not happen in real time, but are described through great dumps of exposition. As a result it is boring to read the abusive scenes are stripped of nearly all the emotional significance.

In my view this book should have been rejected by the publisher and the author advised to substantially rework it. The narrative can't decide if it is a story about a religious cult and their internment in an abusive prison camp run by religious extremists (a social and political commentary story that requires exploration of multiple interned characters and involves a number of action scenes), or a story about the family relationships of the central character (an individual story centred on emotions). As it is the novel falls between two stools, so neither of the stories is properly developed. I would only recommend this book as a cautionary example for overconfident novelists!

2 people found this helpful

S. Naomi Scott

Dark and Disturbing, but still an outstanding read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 29, 2015

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Where Parable of the Sower introduces us to protagonist Lauren Olamina and her journey towards the creation of her first Earthseed community, Parable of the Talents shows us the downfall and eventual rebirth of that community, albeit as a community that is more diffuse and distributed.

It begins five years after the settlement of Acorn, the Earthseed community founded at the end of the first book, and initially shows us the ways in which the community has grown and adapted to the ongoing social collapse that is taking place in the rest of the United States. For a short while life in the community seems good, though there is an undercurrent of possible danger presented in the form of Presidential hopeful Andrew Steele Jarrett, a Christian hardliner who believes that only a return to 'traditional Christian values' will help the country return to its former glory. Even despite Acorn's success, Lauren is also fighting against her own husband's desire to move them away from the community to somewhere 'safer', especially after she becomes pregnant; his fear of the future works directly in opposition to her inherent optimism, and the reader is given a deeper understanding of both sides of the argument as a result of their interaction.

Things begin to fall apart when Jarrett is elected as President, and shortly afterwards the community is attacked by a group of Christian America (CA) Crusaders, the members of the community enslaved. This is where the novel enters its darkest phase as we are given first hand accounts of the abuses meted out on Lauren's people. The children of the community, including Lauren's newborn baby, are taken away, and the men and women of the community are segregated and kept apart. Everything they have built for themselves is torn down and destroyed, and Acorn itself is transformed into a concentration camp, rapidly populated with new internees as the CA Crusaders seek to enslave and dehumanise those they see as a threat to their Christian traditions.

The third act of the novel begins with the prisoners at Acorn winning their freedom, though there is a sense of deus ex machina interjected at this point; the slavers themselves are rendered all but impotent when their living quarters are demolished as a result of a mudslide, allowing the prisoners to break free of their chains and escape. Lauren then sets out to locate and rescue as many of the lost children as possible, particularly her own lost daughter. Along the way we're given a broader picture of the world beyond the confines of Acorn, and it's suggested that those on the outside either don't care about the atrocities being committed by the Crusaders or simply aren't willing to believe that they'd be capable of such acts.

Lauren finally finds her daughter several years later, though the meeting between them is somewhat bittersweet. During her travels Lauren has managed to sow the seeds of a much larger Earthseed movement, while her daughter has been raised in a predominantly Christian manner, albeit while maintaining a degree of skepticism along the way. While there's no happy reunion between them, there is a reconciliation of sorts.

The narrative throughout the book alternates between the voice of Lauren herself, in the form of journal entries, and the voice of her daughter, Larkin, who we eventually learn has been separated from her mother for most of her life. By juxtaposing the two voices in this way we get a strong sense that while Larkin admires and respects the achievements of her mother, it's made clear that she doesn't necessarily agree with her mother's motives and beliefs.

In conclusion, if Parable of the Sower was a dark and disturbing read, this book is even more so. For that reason I'd consider it to outstanding, and definitely worth a read, though it should be noted that some of the themes the book explores may be triggering for some readers.

13 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Parable of the Talents

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 16, 2021

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Parable of the Talents is a great read - pertinent for these times. Octavia Butler's influence continues to grow - with NASA recently naming the Mars landing site after her.

2 people found this helpful

Mrs. A. J. Whiteley

A Timely Parable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 1, 2003

Verified Purchase

Governments and religions are big subjects. It's amazing that Octavia E Butler can make them seem so accessible; that the answers to the squabbles over 'who's right and who's wrong' could actually be so simple, if only we were prepared to be honest with ourselves.
This is a book that speaks to the here and now. If you're concerned about what is happening in the world today, read it. If you have ever asked yourself about religion and the function it serves in our society, read it. If you just like a good book with a strong storyline, read it. It can offer something on all of these levels, and personally speaking, I have yet to stop thinking about the questions it raises.

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Follow the Author

Parable of the Talents Kindle Edition

From the Publisher

From the Illustrated Biography

Octavia E. Butler at age thirteen

Parable of the Sower book tour

Octavia E. Butler's legacy

Product description

Review

From Library Journal

From Amazon

About the Author

From Booklist

From Publishers Weekly

From the Back Cover

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About the author

Octavia E. Butler

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